Cuisine Royale

If the video game industry had eras like human history does, we are currently living in the battle royale age, given the fact that the market has been flooded with games like Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds and Fortnite in the last two years or so. Thankfully, at least we seem to have moved on from the MOBA era, and this current trend still has a lot to offer if developers keep coming up with interesting ideas.

Cuisine Royale started as a joke game based on an MMO shooter called Enlisted, but since people received it so well, it actually got developed into a full game ready to be released. The main idea is not at all different from all the other titles in this niche, which means that your main goal is to be the last man alive by killing everyone else. However, the humorous props and items make the experience a lot more fun than you would expect at first.

As such, you don’t get kevlar or military-grade armors to wear in battle, but run-of-the-mill kitchen pots and pans that can be strapped to your body for some sort of improvised protection. Waffle makers, colanders and woks can be just as good as regular armor, at least in this case, but the actual weapons are a bit more serious.

In essence, except for some silly melee weapons added for fun, the guns are all WWII-specific, so the combination of ideas is definitely exciting. You can also raid loot boxes to gain new items, and these are actually just fridges that sometimes are full of frozen pizzas instead of bullets or machine guns.

It must be mentioned that Cuisine Royale is still pretty much a joke game at this point, especially since it doesn’t feature multiple game modes or too many different maps. It also supports only 30 players at once, significantly fewer than most similar titles. The maps are still fairly large, on the other hand, so there is a lot to explore.

The shooting mechanics are pretty straightforward, although realism is not absent, in spite of the silly armor pieces. Hence, recoil is pretty tough to deal with in the case of bigger weapons, and the physics engine is on par with the best out there. Speaking of which, the graphics quality is very good, and the game is also optimized to run smoothly even on low-end machines.

In the end, Cuisine Royale does not innovate the genre in any way, but it’s actually a lot more polished than many serious productions out there. Hence, the lack of different game modes can be a bit of a pain after a few hours of doing the same thing, but at least the matches are hurried along by the in-game timers that restrict the play area every few minutes, so you don’t get to waste too much time hiding in bushes.